How to Read a [Medical] Paper

Thanks to Virginia Hedrick ("Dr. Juice") at UCLA for calling my attention to the following excellent articles in the British Medical Journal on "How to Read a [Medical] Paper."

So far, 7 segments have been published.Ê All are excerpts from a book, How to read a Paper: the Basics of Evidence-Based Medicine, that is available from the British Medical Journal's bookshop.Ê (If you go there, in the BMJ Books Index, click onMedical Journalism, Research.)
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  • The Medline database
  • Getting your bearings (deciding what the paper is about)
  • Assessing the methodological quality of published papers
  • Statistics for the non-statistician
  • Statistics for the non-statistician. II: "Significant" relations and their pitfalls
  • Papers that report drug trials
  • Papers that report diagnostic or screening tests